CAIRO — The violently anti-American rallies that have roiled the Islamic world over a video denigrating the Prophet Muhammad expanded on Friday to more than a dozen countries, with demonstrators breaching the United States Embassy in Tunisia for the first time and protesters in Sudan’s capital broadening the targets to include Germany and Britain.

The broadening of the protests appeared unabated by calls for restraint from the new Islamist president of Egypt, where the demonstrations first erupted four days ago on the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. In Washington, the Pentagon announced that it was dispatching 50 Marines to secure the American diplomatic compound in Yemen’s capital, which was partly defiled by enraged protesters on Thursday. At a bazaar about 30 miles east of Jalalabad, Afghanistan, protesters burned an effigy of President Obama.

The breaching of the United States Embassy in Tunis, the birthplace of the Arab Spring revolutions, was at least the fourth time that an American diplomatic facility in the Middle East had been violated since the protests began. There were also unconfirmed reports from Tunis that protesters had torched an American school.

Germany’s foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, told reporters at the Foreign Ministry in Berlin that the country’s embassy in Khartoum, Sudan, had been “stormed and in part set aflame” in an attack by “demonstrators capable of violence.” According to Mr. Westerwelle, embassy employees were safe. German missions in Muslim countries had already strengthened security measures because of the unrest.

The police fired tear gas to drive off the attacks in Khartoum, where about 5,000 demonstrators massed on the German and British Embassies, a witness told the Reuters news agency.

Thousands of Palestinians joined demonstrations after Friday Prayer in the Gaza Strip. Since there is no American diplomatic representation in Gaza, the main gathering took place in Gaza City, outside the Parliament building, where American and Israeli flags were placed on the ground for the crowds to stomp. Some demonstrators chanted, “Death to America and to Israel!” Palestinians also clashed with Israeli security forces in Jerusalem and held protests in the West Bank.

My initial reaction to this was 'Well, there goes all the sympathy you generated during the Arab Spring'.

But then I realized that's not entirely fair. When you compare the numbers involved, there is no comparison. Tens of thousands spontaneously converged on Tahrir Square and many other places in the Arab world and stayed for weeks or even months with the support of the majority of the population. These senseless attacks on embassies, OTOH, are orchestrated, involved 5000 at most, and will fizzle within a few days (probably).

And no matter what the scale of the problem with radical Islamicism, I still believe democracy is the way forward.

An independent U.N. panel has confirmed that an increasing number of ‘foreign elements,’ including jihadis, are now operating in Syria.

The investigative panel appointed by the Human Rights Council says some of these forces are joining armed anti-government groups while others are operating on their own.

The head of the panel, Brazilian diplomat and professor Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, told diplomats Monday in Geneva that “such elements tend to push anti-government fighters towards more radical positions.”

Activists say at least 23,000 people have been killed in Syria in the past 18 months.

Syrian authorities have blamed the anti-government uprising that began in March 2011 on a foreign conspiracy and accused some Gulf and Western countries of offering funding and training to the rebels, whom they describe as terrorists.